Year 2017 is the first year in which I start my first full-time job as a data scientist. Therefore, I want to share with you some goals and expectation about this year. I try to split the goals into several parts: the goal in my work at Franprix, the technique of data science, the business analysis, the communication skill, and the improvement of my language.
Franprix
Franprix is a dominant grocery store chain of the Groupe Casino, headquartered in Paris, with over 800 stores and annual turnover of over 1 billion euros. I joined in the pricing team, my principle mission is to make optimal decision, to attract more clients and to increase the turnover, with the help of statistical algorithms and related software. Since I’ve started working for only two weeks, currently need to understand, to be familiar with our databases, workflows and algorithms, and then, contribute to our business.
Technique
Thanks to working, I get to use some new software.
Talend
Talend is a software vendor specializing in Big Data Integration. The company provides big data, Cloud, data integration, data management, Master Data Management, data quality, data preparation and enterprise application integration software and services.
During our work, we often use its data integration product to realise the process ETL(Extract, Transform, Load) with its graphic interface and query SQL.
Microstrategy
Microstrategy is a provider of business intelligence (BI), mobile software, and cloud-based services. It uses business intelligence and predictive analytics to search through and perform analytics on big data from a variety of sources, including data warehouses, Excel files, and Hadoop distributions.
At present, we haven’t used it yet, but in next steps, we will integrate R and d3.js in it, and go deeper in data science.
R
Yes, in addition to Talend and Microstrategy, we also use R, with which I’ve already been familiar. Except data integration, statistic algorithms can be achieved by R, for instance, regression, clustering, association analysis, etc.
For the first two softwares, I need to learn, know well and get hold of them as soon as possible. For R, I will go deeper into the technology, and finish reading the book “R in action”.
Business Analysis
Besides the technology, another pretty important point is business thinking. If we only know technology, we cannot understand the objective of analysis; however, if we only know business, we cannot make the optimal decision. Nothing but combining the technology and business thinking together, they can serve each other and contribute to optimal decision making. Thus, in my career, I will train my business thinking and remind myself to analyse with business objective.
Communication Skill
Before analysing, we should know well the context of the requirement, so that we can analyse in the round. Therefore, I need to communicate with the colleagues who put forward the requirements, know clearly what they really want, then my analysis will be useful.
Furthermore, what should a data scientist do after analysing? It’s presenting the results to our colleagues. It sounds easy, but remember, we should simplify the technical things, present clearly in order to let everyone understand. So, communication is really important during the work.
Language
Well, since I work in France, need to speak French everyday, and as what I talked above, communication is important, so imporve my French level is the “urgent and important” thing. In addition to talking with colleagues everyday, I will also listen to the radio, watch TV news and read novels in French.
Moreover, English should not be forgotten, as it becomes more and more important, I should also improve my English level in the ways above and write blogs as well.
Well, here is my goal for 2017. What is yours?